The gift books come in all shapes and sizes this year: big, little, tiny, huge, long, short, fat and thin, rather like their writers, I would guess. Biggest and fattest of them all is The Art of Aardman (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). This is a coffee-table book, pure and simple, that celebrates 40 years of animation at Aardman Studios, who make Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and others, and I would suggest that you have known since the beginning of this sentence whether or not you want this book for Christmas. It’s everything you would wish for from such a volume, featuring stills from the films, drawings from the animators’ sketchbooks, portraits of sets, technical drawings for props, manifold character studies and very, very few words indeed. It’s a book to get lost in on Boxing Day, or any day before or after.
Slightly smaller is Jane Bown’s Cats (Guardian/Faber, £14.99). Bown was a photographer who joined the Observer in 1949, worked almost exclusively in black and white with natural light, and died a couple of years ago. This is, again very simply, a book full of photos of cats. ‘Why would anyone need this?’ said my partner, before spending the entire afternoon leafing through it. They are not obvious photographs of cats, but oddly enough each one seems to tell a story, and because the photos were mainly taken between the 1950s and the 1980s, there’s the slightly sombre knowledge that all of these cats are long dead. It’s probably best consumed with a cat on your lap, or at the very least, one purring around your legs asking for the food you’ve forgotten to give it.
One constantly thriving sub-genre of the gift book category is the Book About Words, of which there is an apparently never-ending supply.
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